People seem to measure their sustainability efforts by how hard they feel they tried. But nature and doesn’t react to how we feel. Nature reacts to how we act. People constantly tell me they’re what they can, they can’t do any more, or they balanced how much they can do with what time, money, and other resources they have. I’m not just talking about my Mom, but nearly everyone. Using[…] Keep reading →

Hosting a successful podcast on sustainability, I get a lot of requests or suggestions to bring on as guests people who sell more things, claiming they reduce waste relative to something more wasteful: compostable straws, jewelry from ocean plastic, clothes you can trace to the cotton farm, etc. Selling more isn’t selling less. If you make a polluting system more efficient, you pollute more efficiently, even if you make your[…] Keep reading →

Picking up litter daily, as I have since 2017, I notice many trends. One big one is that Saturday and Sunday mornings, my neighborhood has more litter from people going out the night before. The plastic cups from bars, bottles, takeout containers, and other detritus from visitors makes it obvious. Most of the trash cans are overflowing, so when I pick up the litter, I can’t put it anywhere. I[…] Keep reading →

Living sustainably is easy. All humans did for most of human history. Animals do it. Living differently than everyone else can be hard, even when you live how they want. People push hard against people who remind them they aren’t living by their values. Alison, the host of This Sustainable Life: Untethered, wrote to ask me how I handled the challenge around the time she wrote a post, The Diary[…] Keep reading →

I just finished reading Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court. His coaching tells more how to live sustainably as individuals and a culture than anything else I remember reading or hearing. For those who don’t know, from Wikipedia: John Wooden (1910 – 2010) was an American basketball coach and player. He won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period as head coach for[…] Keep reading →

I mop as part of my six-day exercise cycle. Part of my ritual before my lifting days is to mop the floors, so every six days I mop the whole apartment. More accurately, I shifted from mopping to getting on my hands and knees and cleaning with a sponge. The ritual reminds me of monks, who seem to take on tasks with a measure of quality that focus the mind[…] Keep reading →

Readers have asked me to post more on preparing food. As you know, one of my biggest motivations is accessibility. I try to promote what anyone can do and to show how to do it. My sister asked me for pictures of my fermentations in action. I happen to have a few going, so took pictures of them. I thought making a video would help show what to expect. Before[…] Keep reading →

Joe Biden can lead in a lot more ways than using authority, which is the least effective tool of a leader. The President of the United States is not some guy on the street. He’s at a leverage point of a system, with great influence. Imagine if Biden stood with the protesters of a pipeline. Imagine he simply took an inventory of his personal waste and minimized it and showed[…] Keep reading →

People are proposing wealth taxes People are talking about taxing wealth. Everyone relies on society so if you own more, you use more and benefited more, they say, so should pay more. Besides, they add, the wealthy can structure what anyone would call income so it doesn’t look like income on taxes so avoid paying any taxes. Moreover, they further add, there’s no “natural” law that makes wealth untaxable, so[…] Keep reading →